Sunday, December 29, 2013

Glenn Greenwald's must-watch 30C3 keynote

Yesterday in Hamburg, Glenn Greenwald gave an astounding, must-watch keynote address to the gathered hackers at the 30th Chaos Communications Congress, or 30C3 (Greenwald starts at 4:36). Greenwald excoriated the press for failing to hold the world's leaders to account, describing what he did with the Snoweden leaks as challenge to the journalistic status quo as well as the political status quo. This is a leaping-off point for an extended riff on the active cooperation between the press and the national security apparatus, an arrangement calculated to give the appearance of oversight on surveillance activities without any such oversight (for example, BBC reporter expressed shock when he said that the role of the press should be to root out lies from senior spies, saying that generals and senior officials would ever lie to the public).
Greenwald draws a connection between private companies and spying, expressing hope that Internet giants will finally understand that their profitability is endangered by their collaboration with spies. He describes these companies as having "unparalleled power" to curb state spying.
He exhorted the hackers at 30C3 to do their best to make the Internet as secure for its users as possible, saying that without their contributions, all is lost. He urges them to strike back at Silicon Valley intelligence collaborators like Palantir, who pose as hip and technie to attract bright young people to help with their mission to attack privacy.
The whole speech is important; it praises Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks, and Daniel Ellsberg, as well as other brave whistelblowers, and said that the Snowden project built on their work. He said that the heavy-handed attacks on whistleblowers by the US government have only revealed the state's corruption and inspired more insiders to go public.
Notably, Greenwald revealed that the NSA and GCHQ are spying on in-flight Internet service, something that had not been revealed to date.
The audio is already on Soundcloud, and I've extracted the audio as an MP3 and put it on the Internet Archive (MP3). Keynote Glenn Greenwald 30C3